FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE Release Notes

Release Highlights

A new virtualization container named “vimage”
has been implemented. This is a jail with a virtualized
instance of the FreeBSD network stack and can be created by
using jail(8)
command.

The FreeBSD netisr framework has been reimplemented for
parallel threading support. This is a kernel network dispatch
interface which allows device drivers (and other packet
sources) to direct packets to protocols for directly
dispatched or deferred processing. The new implementation
supports up to one netisr thread per CPU, and several
benchmarks on SMP machines show substantial performance
improvement over the previous version.

The FreeBSD TTY layer has been replaced with a new one
which has better support for SMP and robust resource handling. A tty
now has own mutex and it is expected to improve scalability when
compared to the old implementation based on the Giant lock.

[amd64, i386] The FreeBSD Linux emulation layer has been
updated to version 2.6.16 and the default Linux infrastructure
port is now emulators/linux_base-f10
(Fedora 10).

The FreeBSD USB subsystem has been reimplemented to support
modern devices and better SMP scalability. The new implementation
includes Giant-lock-free device drivers, a Linux compatibility layer, usbconfig(8) utility, full
support for split transaction and isochronous transaction, and so
on.

The FreeBSD CAM SCSI subsystem (cam(4)) now includes
experimental support for ATA/SATA/AHCI-compliant
devices.

The shared vnode locking for pathname lookups in the VFS(9) subsystem has
been improved.

The ZFS file system has been
updated to version 13. The changes include ZFS operations by a regular
user, L2ARC, ZFS Intent Log on separated disks (slog), sparse volumes,
and so on.

The FreeBSD NFS subsystem now supports RPCSEC_GSS authentication on both the client and
server.

The FreeBSD NFS subsystem now includes a new, experimental
implementation with support for NFSv2, NFSv3, and
NFSv4.

The wireless network support layer (net80211) now supports
multiple BSS instances on the supported network
devices.

The FreeBSD L2 address translation table has been
reimplemented to reduce lock contention on parallel processing
and simplify the routing logic.

The IGMPv3 and SSM (Source-Specific Multicast) including
IPv6 SSM and MLDv2 have been added.